Life Lessons That Fail

We are working on informative writing using text evidence. Reminder: I teach second grade. We read a story about penguins and were going to write what we learned about penguins.

My class is known for copying text exactly from the text. Word for word. I told them about Plagiarism and that is was illegal. I told them that you can’t copy someone else’s work and say that it is your own.

“Why is that illegal??” Second grader

“Because you are taking someone else’s writing and saying you wrote them. It’s stealing their work that they worked so hard on!” Me

“But why is that bad?” Second grader

“Imagine if I took a Taylor Swift song and sang it. I told everyone I wrote it and sold it. I made lots of money off of it. I would be stealing Taylor Swift’s song and selling it.” Me

“Yeah but Taylor Swift is actually important…” Second grader

Apparently we need a lesson on why authors are important.

Sometimes my life lessons fail miserably and go right over their heads.